One night while living on a precipice high above the Monongahela River on Pittsburgh's south side, I ate half a bag of psychedelic mushrooms. I tripped alone. First, I saw fractals forming on my ceiling so intensely that I became sick. I made it to a small deck on the side rear of the house before puking. The deck was three stories off the ground even thought it was technically on the first floor.
After all the vomiting was done, I lifted my head and looked the straight across the 18th Street ravine. There I saw a great cement amd steel city grow out of the graves of those dead for centuries. The cemetery was vibrant, tall, and growing.
Instantly I understood that time is not a linear construct and that the dead and living co-mingle daily, each learning from the other, each who are on their own journey through whatever existence really is. Finite concepts all collapsed to reveal there are truly no limits except those imposed by universal fears. That greatest fear, the one at the root of all fears, is death. But what if death really does not exist in the scope of all time?
Yeah, good shrooms. Suffice to say, a year later I find myself driving, my car pointed for the keys. I made it across the seven mile bridge Just Before Dawn and laying on my windshield catch some z's before heading on to Bahia Honda, where I planned on camping. Eventually I settled in South Beach - a place where, in 1996, English was nothing more than a second language as thousands of Cuban balseros were on the front line of the coming Latin Invasion.
MORE TO COME
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